FAMM Arquitectura Suspends a Concrete and Teak Home Over the Costa Rican Jungle in Santa Teresa

Five minutes from the white sand beach of Santa Teresa, on a steep plot wrapped in tropical forest, FAMM Arquitectura built a house that reads less like an object dropped onto a site and more like a series of platforms threaded through the canopy. Jungla House occupies 265 square meters on an 837 square meter lot, and that ratio is telling: the architecture is deliberately compact in footprint so the jungle can press in from every side. Three levels step down the hillside, each one calibrated to a different relationship with the ground, the trees, and the horizon.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is its improvised evolution. Midway through construction, the property changed hands, and the new owner asked for an additional floor. Rather than start over, FAMM introduced concrete beams into the social area to carry the new upper volume, turning a logistical curveball into a compositional advantage. The result is a house whose section is richer than its plan: a stacked sequence of living, sleeping, and working spaces that gain altitude as they gain privacy, culminating in a main bedroom with a perimeter balcony that floats at treetop level.

A Facade Built Into the Hill

Seen from the downhill side, Jungla House reveals its full three-level section: a stone-clad base anchored by retaining walls, a glazed middle band of social space, and a cantilevered upper volume finished in timber and white plaster. The stacking is not symmetrical. Each floor shifts slightly, creating overhangs that shade the level below and generating the visual impression that the house is peeling away from the slope rather than sitting on it.

From the street, by contrast, the house is almost invisible. A horizontal timber fence and stone retaining wall are all that register at eye level. The upper volume hovers above, set back enough to disappear behind the tree line. That asymmetry between the public and private faces is a smart move for a region with limited urban development: the house protects its own seclusion without needing gates or high walls.

Open Plan, Open Air

The ground floor collapses kitchen, dining, and living into a single room that stretches between two walls of folding glass. When both ends are thrown open, the space becomes a covered terrace: ocean breeze enters on one side, forest air on the other, and cross ventilation replaces the need for mechanical cooling. The striped teak ceiling, supported by the concrete beams that were added mid-construction, gives the room a rhythmic order that holds everything together without subdivision.

At one end, the room spills onto a timber deck that terminates at the pool edge. The pool itself is elevated above the lower garden, so swimming feels like hovering over the canopy. It is a deliberate inversion: the social heart of the house is not inward-looking but radically outward, directed toward a wide frame of vegetation that changes character with every shift of cloud or wind.

Circulation as Architecture

FAMM treats stairs and passageways not as afterthoughts but as primary experiences. An exterior staircase wrapped in vertical timber louvers connects the lower levels to the added upper floor, filtering light into narrow bands that shift across the stone wall and gravel bed below. Inside, a metal stair with open risers is flanked by slatted timber screens that let dappled sunlight fall through from above, turning a simple vertical connection into a sensory event.

These circulation elements do double duty. The louvers provide shade and rain protection while maintaining airflow. The open risers keep visual continuity between floors, preventing the compact plan from feeling claustrophobic. Movement through the house is never neutral: you are always aware of the forest pressing against the envelope, visible through every gap and slot.

Light, Shadow, and Material

Two images capture the material palette at its quietest. A white plaster wall catches dappled sunlight from the trees outside, projecting leaf shadows onto the polished concrete floor in a pattern that changes by the hour. In the main bedroom, the same concrete floor anchors a timber platform bed beneath a paneled headboard wall, with pendant lights casting their own crisp shadows in the afternoon sun. These are restrained rooms. No accent walls, no statement finishes, just three materials working together: concrete, teak, and plaster.

The local stone that clads the perimeter wall appears again in the exterior passageways, grounding the house in the geology of the site. Sustainable teak sourced from regional plantations provides warmth without environmental guilt. Tempered glass, used generously but always in operable panels, disappears when open, so the material presence of the house is ultimately mineral and vegetal rather than industrial.

Why This Project Matters

Jungla House is not the first tropical home to claim a dialogue with nature, and it won't be the last. What sets it apart is the honesty of its process. The mid-construction change of ownership forced an improvisation that most architects would treat as a problem to manage. FAMM turned it into an opportunity, adding a level that gave the house its most compelling spatial moment: a bedroom suspended in the treetops with a continuous planter along the rear facade, so the jungle literally grows into the section. That kind of adaptive thinking is worth more than any rendering.

More broadly, the project demonstrates that passive design in the tropics does not require technological spectacle. Cross ventilation through operable glass walls, high ceilings, shaded overhangs, and local stone mass are centuries-old strategies executed here with contemporary precision. In a region where air conditioning is the default response to heat, Jungla House makes the case that the simplest moves, properly deployed, remain the most effective.

Jungla House by FAMM Arquitectura, Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. 265 m² (5,436 sq ft). Completed 2023. Photography by Andrés García Lachner.

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